The space agency this week announced a $15,000 public contest -- called the “Sky for All challenge” -- to develop technologies that could be part of what it calls “a clean-slate, revolutionary design and concept of operations for the airspace of the future.” The challenge opens Dec. 21, and participants may pre-register now. The deadline for submissions is Feb. 26, 2016 and is being administered by crowdsourcing site HeroX.

Among the elements NASA wants participants to consider is how to design a robust system that can scale up to full capacity under normal operations and scale back to equally safe reduced capacity under poor conditions, like bad weather. Ideas may also consider autonomous adaptation of the system, and protection from possible cyber security attacks, the space agency stated.

NASA is asking participants to ignore current transportation technology and constraints. Submissions should include a full description of the design, including safety features and an explanation of how the new air transportation system would interact with others forms of transportation, including ground and sea.

“Because of the complexity of designing a system that is expected to handle 10 million crewed and uncrewed aircraft in the skies, we are looking for innovative ideas from the public that enhance the work NASA researchers are doing right now,” said Natalia Alexandrov, lead of the Ab Initio Design for Autonomous Airspace Operations in a statement.

The Sky for All challenge is just the latest in a long line of crowdsourced contests NASA has driven over the years. Others have included a contest to build inventive CubeSats, robotics, high-speed computers and others.

NASA’s challenges are also part of a growing federal and public plan to use crowdsourcing as a way to garner as many ideas on how to solve difficult problems as possible.

The White House Office of Science and Technology in January celebrated the the fifth anniversary of the America Competes Act which in combination with Challenge.gov has prompted more than 400 public-sector prize competitions which have doled out some $72 million in prizes over the past few years. Agencies like NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as well as private entities like the X Prize Foundation have used competitions to address high-tech challenges for years with great success.